I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong enough to be almost pain.  But Dean Stanley did more than I asked.  He suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer the Sacrament.

“A stranger’s presence is always trying to a sick person,” he said, with rare delicacy of thought, “and, joined to the excitement of the service, it might be too much for your dear mother.  If I spend half an hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will, I think, be better for her.”

So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set himself to understand my own position.  He finally told me that conduct was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as “Christians” who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of Christ.  On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but little stress; Jesus was “in a special sense the Son of God,” but it was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls.  The one important matter was the recognition of “duty to God and man,” and all who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of God and self-sacrifice for man.  “The Holy Communion,” he concluded, in his soft tones, “was never meant to divide from each other hearts that are searching after the one true God.  It was meant by its founder as a symbol of unity, not of strife.”

On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her.  He soothed away all her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.  “Remember,” she told me he said to her—­“remember that our God is the God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never be displeasing in His eyes.”  Once again after that he came, and after his visit to my mother we had another long talk.  I ventured to ask him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of England.  “I think,” he answered, gently, “that I am of more service to true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without.”  And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a rarely independent position, and could make the